Administrator

So, I know a lot of pet sites usually start off with either shared hosting or a dedicated server. I know Ichumon opened up on a shared host and I believe Misticpets did as well, so the question is, how many servers has your pet site & SIM game out grew?

Has it just gone from a shared host to a dedicated server? Or has it gone through multiple server changes and upgrades?

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

Both my sites started with their own dedicated servers. Khimeros is a bit of a resource hog, and we've added RAM a couple of times. Pretty soon we're going to add a second server to be our image server while keeping our current dedicated. Aluriya is a pretty different animal from Khimeros, and I don't imagine that we'll grow out of our dedicated server any time soon. We intentionally designed it to be a lighter than Khimeros.

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

Administrator

Both my sites started with their own dedicated servers. Khimeros is a bit of a resource hog, and we've added RAM a couple of times. Pretty soon we're going to add a second server to be our image server while keeping our current dedicated. Aluriya is a pretty different animal from Khimeros, and I don't imagine that we'll grow out of our dedicated server any time soon. We intentionally designed it to be a lighter than Khimeros.

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Why is Kmimeros such a resource hog? Are the pages pretty intensed in terms of queries and such? What are the server specs?

Actually we opened on VPS then went dedicated and went through about 3 or 4 different dedicated hosts XP

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What company did you use for the VPS? What companies did you use and why so many different servers?

VPL Member

Subeta has... gone through a lot of companies, heh. Right now we're pretty happy with Softlayer (we were with ThePlanet, but they recently merged) however we're looking to move to RackSpace sometime in the future. We're currently in talks with them about having a dedicated MySQL box (our's is currently super powerful. 40GB of memory, with two SSD's) and the rest of the servers powered in "the cloud".

Did I mention that Subeta is really the best in this post? If not, well. Subeta is the best. xoxoxo

VPL Member

IcePets is still on the same basic $10 a month shared hosting, considering we haven't made any moves for major growth yet and the site being optimized enough to handle 40 or so online players without needing to upgrade.

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

Khimeros is a resource hog because our images are huge, plus we have a lot of really complicated, involved features. Our pets have a ton of layers, though we recently reduced this by half, by changing how pet hybridization works.

We currently use LiquidWeb for hosting, I'm not all that thrilled with them though. Often when we have a question it doesn't seem like they really know what they're talking about. We've had the same errors occur on Aluriya that happened on Khimeros when we opened ("forgetting" to switch the bandwidth settings, so that the site would go down when their systems thought we were still operating on a shared server and using too many resources). We also had to get our own apache guy to optimize the settings when we were having issues with khimeros during alpha, and LW couldn't figure it out (though our Apache guy spotted the problem in five minutes). Perhaps we'll end up changing hosts eventually.

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

Administrator

We currently use LiquidWeb for hosting, I'm not all that thrilled with them though. Often when we have a question it doesn't seem like they really know what they're talking about. We've had the same errors occur on Aluriya that happened on Khimeros when we opened ("forgetting" to switch the bandwidth settings, so that the site would go down when their systems thought we were still operating on a shared server and using too many resources). We also had to get our own apache guy to optimize the settings when we were having issues with khimeros during alpha, and LW couldn't figure it out (though our Apache guy spotted the problem in five minutes). Perhaps we'll end up changing hosts eventually.

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Ya, I know a lot of pet sites usually don't do well with LW unless their scripts are well optimized. We had a server with them and everything went well, but then again, when we ran the server on Zetapets with them sometimes we had a lot of lag because of how poor the scripts were.

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

Oh, our scripts are well optimized, and the sites run very well on their servers in normal times, that's not the problem xD (If your scripts are not well optimized I don't see how they are going to run well on any server, really). It's that when something actually goes wrong and you contact them to try to fix it, they are kind of clueless. I'm talking about issues on their end, for example when they change some kind of permission without alerting us, etc. Or like, a few months ago they "updated" some security feature that did not even affect us, and caused Aluriya to completely crash and corrupted our database. Right away we contacted them and told them NOT to run the update on Khimeros, because we didn't want Khimeros crashing too. And yet, an hour later... Khimeros crashes. They went ahead and did the update despite being asked not to. Luckily, we were finally able to prevail upon them to revert the update, and Nas was able to retrieve Alu's database. Khimeros has hourly backups, so it was easy to just restart from backups, but still. If they had listened to us in the first place, it would never have happened.

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

VPL Member

I'd suggest (much like we're doing) taking a look at RackSpace. They've got some really innovative stuff going on over there, and we're probably going to make the switch (which means lots of investment for us).

Did I mention that Subeta is really the best in this post? If not, well. Subeta is the best. xoxoxo

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

From my experience with LiquidWeb, I'm going to be reluctant to move anywhere until I know that someone else has used them and had a good experience xD At a glance RackSpace seems more expensive than our current hosting, though I may be misreading that. Right now I'm paying around $750 a month for two dedicated servers + hourly offsite backups on Khimeros. The offsite backups are rather stupidly expensive, and we haven't added them to Aluriya yet so we're relying on daily backups. Admittedly though I'm not really all that familiar with cloud servers and the advantages they have.

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

Administrator

Right away we contacted them and told them NOT to run the update on Khimeros, because we didn't want Khimeros crashing too. And yet, an hour later... Khimeros crashes. They went ahead and did the update despite being asked not to. Luckily, we were finally able to prevail upon them to revert the update, and Nas was able to retrieve Alu's database. Khimeros has hourly backups, so it was easy to just restart from backups, but still. If they had listened to us in the first place, it would never have happened.

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Well, isn't Liquidweb a managed server company? Means, they'll update things without your permission? It just doesn't seem right though, but it happens.

@Keith: When do you think you guys might move on over to Rackspace? How many servers?

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

Updating things without our permission in order to keep things running smoothly would be fine. Updating things with the result that our sites crash is not, I'd think, standard practice even for managed server companies. Especially when the client has just contacted them to specifically ask them NOT to update something because it would crash our site and corrupt our database

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

VPL Member

Does anyone have rough idea of what an optimized PHP petsite takes for resources per user? What registered-user and online-user numbers generally correlate to needing to move to a larger server? I know that subetta is huge, so not many sites need to own whole servers. How do you stress test your sites and know what kind of service you'll need?

Administrator

Updating things without our permission in order to keep things running smoothly would be fine. Updating things with the result that our sites crash is not, I'd think, standard practice even for managed server companies. Especially when the client has just contacted them to specifically ask them NOT to update something because it would crash our site and corrupt our database

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Liquidweb is managed servers though, so they can upgrade and update the server as they seek fit. I was with them for a couple years and never really had any problems. If you told their support team "Please don't upgrade without contacting us", I don't think that error would have been made. But, that's just my opinion and experiences with them.

Does anyone have rough idea of what an optimized PHP petsite takes for resources per user? What registered-user and online-user numbers generally correlate to needing to move to a larger server? I know that subetta is huge, so not many sites need to own whole servers. How do you stress test your sites and know what kind of service you'll need?

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Most large pet sites tend to be ran on dedicated servers. It all depends on how well your scripts are coded and such. Some can handle 100 online on a VPS, where others need a dedicated server for that many users online.

VPL SupporterPet Game OwnerVPL Member

@cpvr Sure they can update as they see fit even if a client asks them not to, as they did with me. But, then the client can also feel free to leave and find another host, as I did. I've switched Khimeros over to ServInt; fabulous, quick, service, a far better server package for less money - I'm happy. At least so far. I'd definitely recommend ServInt. At one time the site went down and they had it back up again within 4 minutes of our submitting a ticket.

Owner of Khimeros, a virtual pet site focusing on breeding, collecting, and dynamic item equipping. Pet and minipet artwork by Hibbary.www.khimeros.com​

Administrator

Bumping this thread up for sim game owners and pet site owners alike. How many servers has your game outgrown over the past couple years? How much ram and CPU power does your server have? How often do you upgrade to a new server?

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